es and elements that must be taken into consideration. The range of issues continues to grow, “from the specific nature of an injury, to an athlete’s emotional and sometimes financial dependence on a sport, to the growing awareness of long-term physical consequences caused by repetitive strain on the body,” (Thornton, 1990: 138). Today’s sports medicine physician must somehow take a middle-of-the-road approach with this type of advice, as opposed to traditional advice which was at one extreme or another, from giving “tough-guys” pain medicine to play with injuries to being to conservative and preventing play regardless of the level of pain or the degree of injury.
Where young athletes are concerned, they are at an even higher risk of injury and developing injuries which will affect their long-term health. This is because they are not as fully developed as adult athletes and it is easy for them to cause injury to themselves, especially if they play in pain from a perceived need that it is the “tough” thing to do, “they bring to their sports immature bodies that are more susceptible to chronic stresses of training and participation, with results ranging from heat illness to permanent damage,” (Lord and Kozar, 1989: 72). What often makes young athletes at an even higher risk of injury is the fact that they are often coached or supervised by volunteers with little or no training conditioning or injury assessment. In addition to this, it has been found that many young athletes will not be honest about the degree of pain they are experiencing, especially if they are in front of peers or others whom they wish to make proud (Lord, et.al., 1989).
When physicians do not make careful considerations regarding when to tailor off an athlete’s sports involvement, they risk lawsuit and patient non-compliance. When they work with the athlete and take all the different issues involved into conside
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